Jeff Kaplan On How The 'Blizzard World' Map Was Built, Overwatch League

Heather Newman
, ContributorI write about PC games, VR games and Blizzard esports.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Blizzard Entertainment

The entrance to the Blizzard World map in 'Overwatch,' a riff on the company's iconic wrought-iron gates in Irvine, Calif.

Blizzard Entertainment's popular Overwatch team shooter has a ton of news this week: The Overwatch League professional esports season launches Wednesday, and game director/Blizzard vice president Jeff Kaplan hinted recently to fans that the hotly anticipated new map, "Blizzard World," would be coming out very soon.

The map's a Blizzard theme park, with all sorts of insider nods to players of the company's other games. Whether it's ready "soon" -- as in this week -- or Soon™ in Blizzard style, i.e. when we're darned ready, is always a question. But to tide you over, we had a chance to chat with Kaplan about the map and the league; here are some insights on both.

Heather Newman: Talk about the inspiration for the new map. Clearly this is a labor of love for everyone on the team.

Jeff Kaplan: More than any other map, Blizzard World is a complete passion project. We have a really talented concept artist named Peter Lee who has done tons of work on World of Warcraft. He’s on the StarCraft and Heroes team. Peter, a long time ago, actually for Titan [the abandoned Blizzard massively multiplayer game], had drawn this picture of Blizzard World. He drew the gates of Stormwind as an amusement park. And we thought it was the coolest picture ever. We never did anything with that picture, but our assistant game director is a guy named Aaron Keller. He’s a long time Blizzard veteran. He built Stormwind. He built Orgrimmar. [Both cities are from World of Warcraft.] Both art and design, super talented, amazing world builder.

Newman:He’s the one who made all the roofs in Stormwind different colors?

Kaplan:Yes, he’s the exact guy who made that decision, so you could break up the districts. And Aaron always would go back to Peter’s drawing and thought it was the most brilliant thing ever. It developed a life of its own. Aaron said, look, we can make this thing. First of all, D.Va is a StarCraft player. We’ve established that Blizzard exists in the Overwatch canon. We’re safe to do this. Imagine how cool a Blizzard theme park would be.

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The Blizzard World version of those roofs in 'Overwatch.'

You can’t stop people when you come up with an idea like that, especially these guys who have worked on Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo their whole careers. You start talking about, oh, you start at the Hearthstone tavern, and then there will be the Nexus, and we’ll have a restaurant called Snaxxramas [based on the WoW dungeon Naxxramas]. I can’t wait, because there’s so much detail in this map. It’s one of those things where you need to put the map up by yourself and go run around.

We have the actual voice actors of Deckard Cain, Uther, and the Adjutant from StarCraft, all the voice actors. And little sound clips as you: If you go up to the fire, Uther will say some stuff to you. There’s a tome up in the Diablo area. Deckard Cain will come out with Deckard Cain-isms all day long. From a technical standpoint, it’s also the map we’ve put the most into, ever, in terms of just assets and—it was sort of an overwhelming—there’s always this war between environmental artists and engine tech optimizers. The engine tech optimizers were sweating it out on this map. But they made it work. They got all the little details in there that were so much fun.

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Jeff Kaplan, 'Overwatch' game director

Newman:Talk about some of those technical aspects. From an art perspective, there’s a lot going on, but there was in Dorado and King’s Row and other maps as well. A lot of little details and discoverables. What’s new and different and so complex about this one?

Kaplan:I’ll give you some of the inside baseball on making video games, what the expensive stuff is. Any time you can see through anything. Any time there’s a translucent texture on anything. That’s very expensive. When you look out of windows in the Hearthstone tavern, that’s really expensive. Any time anything is movable or destructible. Crates that break.

In the case of Blizzard World, we have balloons that you can shoot, and it’ll explode and confetti comes out, or you can shoot the string of the balloon and the balloon will float up, and then you can shoot the balloon and it’ll pop. There’s a lot going on. There are lots of balloons. The probes flying around, you can shoot those out of the air in the map.

Plus, water is very expensive. The whole thing takes place on—there’s Murloc Island. Booty Bay is there. All of the animated stuff in the distance, how much you animate props, that’s a big deal. How much is drawn in any scene.

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A water area in the Blizzard World map with a 'Starcraft' theme.

Traditionally what we do in video games, it’s called vis blocking, which means you put a lot of 90-degree angles. You don’t show wide vistas or whatever. But what makes Blizzard World cool is looking out across the park and seeing all the cool stuff. Those were a lot of the ways we were pushing the technical limits. The other major thing that goes on in any game that needs to render in 3D, like our engine needs to do, is how much texture memory you’re using at any time. If the whole world was a warehouse, or shipping crates--

Newman:Where the walls all look the same and the crates are all made of the same stuff.

Kaplan:You’re not pulling a bunch of textures in and out of memory. Here we want Warcraft Land, and then we want StarCraft Land, which doesn’t look anything like Warcraft Land. Diablo Land can’t be any different. We also literally have different volumetric fog and lighting systems in the different environments. The way the Diablo area is lit--the second you go past that gate that says Reign of the Black King, the lighting engine is pushed in different ways than it was previously. We had to develop specific tech to light the different areas that would be acceptable by StarCraft, Warcraft, and Diablo standards.

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Moody lighting adds a creep factor in this section of the map.

Newman:Did you guys pull the other teams in to say, hey, we’re making an amusement park version of your game?

Kaplan:One of the hardest process parts in making this map is that we’re taking Warcraft’s baby, StarCraft’s baby, Diablo’s baby, and saying, do you mind if I borrow it for a while? It was actually a really cool process, because the game directors and art directors from all the other major franchises were included at every level. Some of them were just awesome. Some of them were, yeah, that looks great, keep doing what you’re doing, no problems here. And others were super particular, so—but in a good way.

Hearthstone is probably the best example, where very early on, Ben Thompson, the art director for Hearthstone, he and Ben Brode came over and they said, we don’t want you to call it the Hearthstone tavern. Call it the Gilded Rose, or something. We had some other name for it. I remember we were doing our review and we were looking, and we said, why is it called the Gilded Rose? That’s kind of lame. It’s the Hearthstone tavern.

And they said, well, it’s not really the Hearthstone tavern. We’re really particular about that. I went over to Ben Brode and Ben Thompson and said, tell me why it’s not the Hearthstone tavern? They said, well, the window—if you look at the Hearthstone tavern window, it has to look exactly this way. We need the fireplace to look exactly the same. We brought them over and said, okay, just tell us how to make it. We’ll make it exactly how you want it, and we did that.

It got to the point then where Ben got really excited, Ben Thompson. He’s like, you know what would be cool, how about if you moved the Hearthstone sign here? And then maybe you could have a tapestry here. Put the Hearthstone logo over here. Literally, Ben Thompson, art director of Hearthstone, was art directing the Hearthstone tavern in Overwatch. It was so meta. But it was rad. It was super awesome. And it was important. We had to get it right. It would be offensive if we did a Hearthstone thing and those guys weren’t happy with it.

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The Hearthstone Tavern.

Newman:Considering the meta-ness of it all, do you feel like players will be in on the joke? That they’ll look at it and go, ha ha, this its Blizzard poking a little fun? As opposed to, these guys are so full of themselves they’re putting their own games in their own games.

Kaplan:I hope they’re in on the joke. Part of it is a joke and part of it’s a love letter. It’s not a love letter to Blizzard. It’s a love letter to StarCraft, Warcraft, and Diablo.Overwatch isn’t a part of Blizzard World.

Newman:Like that moment in the Overwatch intro video, with the guard playing Hearthstone on the tablet at the museum.

Kaplan:Yeah, we have that. We have D.Va as a StarCraft pro. It’s part of what it is. It was super important to us to; it was important for celebration. It wasn’t important, it’s not to market Blizzard. It’s because we thought, what would be more fun for Blizzard fans? Can you imagine a Blizzard theme park and what it would be like to walk through? We can actually give you that experience.

We know there will be people who are skeptical because they think we did it to promote things, which we didn’t. There are also people who’ll just think we’ve jumped the shark. I always tease that we’ve got the shark hanging there. I say, we should put a little sign out front of it that says, please don’t jump me. I think--this is going to sound really terrible, but I think the idea is so much fun that it would be tragic if we didn’t pursue if because there were critics on either side. There’s too much passion behind it. It’s something we had to get out of our systems.

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Stormwind City's main gates in the Blizzard World map in Overwatch.

Newman: Are there plans for an extended arcade mode that would let you just wander around and ride the rides?

Kaplan:That would be awesome. I’m serious, though. I think Overwatch could use more—we have the Overwatch Arcade, which does give us different game modes that play differently. The more we can have fun with Overwatch as a platform, that would be great.

If somebody could figure out a way to make an interactive ride ... I was reading feedback last night. A lot of players wanted the Blizzard World to somehow be an interactive lobby that they could wander around and socialize in. I don’t know if you’ve gone in custom games in Overwatch, but some of my favorite ones are the social dance servers, where they all just go and dance and emote with each other. It’s great. We have gamers playing right now at the highest competitive level, but I want Overwatch to also be a platform where people can just go and dance with each other. That’s what online games should be about.

Newman:You were talking about some of the technical difficulties, the high cost of some of the effects on that map. What did you do to balance against that? Clearly latency is a huge issue for a game that has this strong a core in esports now.

Kaplan:We have our requirements that every map has to run at. We have an amazing technical director, a guy named John LaFleur. He made this engine. I would say, if you took our lead environmental artist, Dion Rogers, who couples greatly with our art director Bill Petras—they’re the yin to John’s yang, you know? And neither is right. They both have the same goal, which is making Overwatch awesome. That means two different things.

To the environmental art team it means, how much stuff can we get on the map? To John it means, how well can the map run? We would never give up on awesome visuals. We would never give up on the map running really well. It just means, how much harder do we all have to work to make it happen? It’s a team effort. The guys go, yeah, we’re not quite hitting the look we need, and that means we’re going to have to push the tech a bit higher. But we would never do it at a cost where the map runs slower or anything like that.

Blizzard Entertainment

Another Blizzard World environment.

Newman:What lessons you feel like you’ve been learning as Overwatch development has come along? We’ve seen some maturity in the space. We’re certainly seeing some maturity in terms of how you’re using it for esports.

Kaplan:Overwatch has evolved to its next stage, which is natural for any online game with a large audience that people are enjoying. You go through a honeymoon phase where nobody knows all the mechanics. Everything seems super new and cool. It’s just all happy good times. And then you get into a settling phase. There’s a maturing not only of the game, but of the audience, where now that they’ve explored these heroes, explored the maps in depth, they’ve gotten to watch pros evolve the scene a bunch—they’re at a higher level of understanding, and they can see a lot more depth in the game than was there before. Which is awesome. It means the game can provide them even more great moments than they were having before. Things are less happenstance.

The down side of that is that with a deeper understanding, they can be more critical at times. They have more of an eye toward balance, whether real or perceived. They’re also prone to fall into whatever the current meta is. I think when you’re a brand new player to a game you don’t care what a meta is. If the meta is—if you’re playing World of Warcraft arenas and the meta is rogue/mage/priest, but you rolled a warlock, you don’t care. I love my warlock. I’m not even level 60 yet. Why should I care what the internet says?

You get a bit of that in Overwatch. The cool part is, because there’s that deep game understanding now, we’re seeing an appreciation for esports in a way we’ve never seen before. A lot of people were skeptical about, could Overwatch be a great esport? Was anybody gonna watch it? The game feels unwatchable. How are you going to get me into esports? We did a huge push to improve the spectating experience. We did all sorts of features, like our instant replay, the team coloring system, the paletting of the UI--

Newman:The branding on the weapons, too.

Kaplan:It super helps, right? If they’re showing first person and suddenly on Lucio’s gun you see Sweden, I know I’m watching Sweden. So all of that, and then—we put a lot of energy and we had a ton of fun developing Overwatch League. A lot of the teams let us participate with them in the logos, the branding, the names, the team colors, which was super fun for us. We love doing that. Really giving this thing an identity.

For me the moment was in that [BlizzCon] match, USA versus South Korea, where the arena was packed. There were hundreds if not thousands of people trying to get into the arena. And everybody in there was chanting. The game looked big and beautiful. Everyone was following every single play. You had this realization—we’re looking at the viewership numbers and it’s hundreds of thousands. People were questioning, could we ever break 100K on an Overwatch esports event? You realized that the maturity of the audience had led us to that moment, and they were waiting for not only a really great tournament to happen, but full dev team support.

When you throw our team of 100 developers behind something, whether it’s making a hero, making a map, or something like making spectating better in Overwatch, we’re going to give it everything we’ve got. Imagine where we’ll be as the League gets rolling and as we get down the line. We’re hoping to transition a lot of those players who have become very hardcore, who do know things like a meta now, and get them to realize, not only can you love playing the game at a high level, but now watching it is super fun too.

Blizzard Entertainment

If you look closely, the player gun in this 'Overwatch' screen shot does indeed say 'Sweden.'

Newman: Overwatch can sometimes be difficult because there aren’t a lot of natural pauses in the game. There isn’t a case where, okay, you get a touchdown, and now we have an opportunity to talk about the whole offensive drive while they set up for the field goal. How do you build those moments into a game that is by definition continuous action, to give broadcasters a moment to say, “Did you see this?"

Kaplan:Our observers are fantastic. They’re getting much better. They now work directly with the development team, so they can request features and have them turned around in real time. A lot of times, the way it works in esports is, all that stuff will just be contracted out, and it might be for this one tournament, and then we never see each other again because we all contract different people for the next tournament. Whereas for Overwatch League the observers are on staff. These people are part of our crew. They can work directly with the development team. They are getting better, and I think we’re starting to learn moments in Overwatch itself. For example, when a team wipe happens, you have about 10-15 seconds before the other team is even going to get started back to the action. You can fill that time with replay, picture-in-picture, statistics. We wrote a specific stats API so all the stats from the matches that are being played are feeding back to the broadcasters.

[At BlizzCon,] there were two trucks running the broadcast. One was the main one, picking the shots, calling the shots, and it was also where the statistician is. We have a full time statistician who’s from the community, who knows Overwatch inside out, feeding stats on the broadcast. And then the other truck was just the observers. It was all of the guys. By observers we mean cameramen. They’re fantastic. They’re fantastic Overwatch players who know how to show the game. They’re mastering things like instant replay. I think that was the first time, the first major tournament where they had all the tools at their disposal.

Our lead character artist was there watching the game that night. His name’s Renaud [Galand]. I said, Renaud, you did such a good job. This looks amazing. And he’s like, I can only see what we need to change. That’s how all of these developers are. They all want to go back right away and make things cooler. I think it’ll just keep evolving over time. It’s very fun for us. It doesn’t feel like a job. It feels like our hobby is making games. You talk about, oh, do you think you could make watching esports better? It’s like, that’s all we think about. Do you think you can make cooler maps? That’s all we think about. That stuff sounds great.

Blizzard Entertainment

Team colors, introduced this fall, also help esports fans keep track of the action.

Newman:What’s the next big thing on your plate to tackle?

Kaplan:I can give you four things. One is the top priority we always have, and that’s the content players want. More maps and heroes. We already have multiple heroes and multiple maps back at the studio in various stages of development. That’s what our players want the most, whenever they ask for stuff, more maps and heroes. Beyond that I think there are three major focuses. One, improve player friendliness toward one another. Protecting our players from one another more. Curbing toxicity wherever possible.

Newman:How do you even start to do that? Short of making it impossible for people to communicate with each other.

Kaplan:That’s a sledgehammer, right? I think with a lot of the toxicity initiatives, it’s kind of the same when we talk about hacking and cheating. The more we talk about specifically what we’re doing, the more it opens the door to workarounds. So we don’t like to talk about it too much. Players will get a message directly in the game if they’ve reported somebody and that person’s been actioned. I’m hoping that encourages people more. But improving on that front, players treating each other nice.

I think we need to look at competitive play and look at how players feel about [skill rating] and comp. [Changes to the Skill Rating system took effect this month with Season 8.] Evaluate and re-evaluate where we’re at with skill rating and how players feel about it. And then, oh my gosh, what is the final one? Overwatch League. It needs to be awesome.

Robert Paul for Blizzard Entertainment

Boston Uprising team players chat during preseason play in the Overwatch League.

Newman:No pressure. Nobody spent any money on this.

Kaplan:No, no. Just a little side thing we’ve got going. I’m sure it’ll all be great.

Newman:I’m sure all those teams will be totally forgiving if things don’t go well.

Kaplan:But those are really what’s going on. And then I know I said four things, but my bonus thing is, we have some pretty cool stuff planned for some of the recurring events that are going to happen. There’s going to be a mix of old and new. Some events have more of a skew toward old and some events have more of a skew to the new. But there’s some really cool surprises coming with the events. We have our April event, which I think will be exciting. The Year of the Rooster will be Year of the Dog this year. It’ll have some old and new.

I've covered gaming for more than two decades, and I cover PC games, VR games and Blizzard eSports for Forbes. Sign up for email alerts when my stories run. Follow me @gbitses.